Elijah Wald was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1959.
Originally planning to make his living as a folk-blues guitarist, he went
off to Europe as a traveling minstrel at age 18, and spent most of the
next dozen years wandering around the world, fronting a blues band in
Sevilla, Spain, a swing trio in Antwerp, Belgium, and a rock band at the
Grand Hotel in Colombo, Sri Lanka, as well as studying with the Congolese
master Jean-Bosco Mwenda. He also toured the United States numerous times,
performing in low dives and honky-tonks, and has recorded two albums:
Songster, Fingerpicker, Shirtmaker and Street Corner Cowboys.

In the early 1980s, he began writing for the Boston Globe, becoming the
newspaper's "roots" and "world music" critic, as well
as writing on American and international music for various magazines.
His books include Josh White: Society Blues, the biography of the
seminal folk-blues singer, and River of Song, a survey of contemporary
music along the Mississippi River, undertaken as part of a multimedia
project for the Smithsonian Institution. His most recent book is Narcocorrido
(Rayo 2001), the first thorough study of the modern Mexican corrido, in
particular the ballads of the drug trade and contemporary politics. He
researched this book by hitch-hiking around Mexico and the southwestern
United States for a year, traveling into the Mexican drug regions to interview
the main composers in the corrido field as well as numerous local "folk"
artists. Currently, he is completing work on a book rethinking the history
and mythology of blues, with a focus on Robert Johnson.